There is something deeply unpalatable about the ability of characters in recent Steven Spielberg films to survive. Thrown, bashed, lodged, stretched – they always come out with nary a bruise. Of course, this is no different to the action films of many other directors, but there is a delight and glee in Spielberg’s work of the dangerous robbed of danger. He only executive produces Eagle Eye (the directing duties left to the beige DJ Caruso), but his fingerprints are all over the whirling-dervish car pile-ups and conveyor-belt shenanigans – the only difference here is that they make a fiendish kind of sense.
We can maybe believe Jason Bourne’s survival through numerous collisions and falls because he has been trained for what may as well be an eternity and has the spatial awareness and physical prowess of a robotic big cat; it frays the imagination when James Bond throws himself into another fight by literally falling off a rooftop in Seville, smashing through a glass skylight and landing with a lucky thud on internal scaffolding; when Jerry Shaw, the hero at the heart of Eagle Eye, is told to jump from the interior of a car being swung across a dock by a wrecking crane and lands on a passing barge it is completely beyond comprehension. But this film has discovered a canny stand-in for the maniacal demands of a laws-and-physics challenged action-world – Jerry is being guided by someone that knows everything. It knows when the barge will be there, it knows when Jerry needs to jump, it even knows the tone of voice to use to make him leap at the right moment.
The discombobulated voice, portrayed with an amusing matriarchal streak of disapproval by an uncredited Julianne Moore, guides both Jerry and his fellow layperson-caught-in-massive-conspiracy Rachel through car chases, downed power lines, prison breaks and fighter jet attacks, keeping them safe as they drive eighty miles an hour through a busy urban street and somehow don’t crash; she insulates them from the things other action stars avoid through sheer dumb luck (and isn’t one of pleasures of these films the look of staggered bemusement on the hero’s face as the helicopter crashes inches away?). Through this simple conceit, Eagle Eye is able to ratchet up the absurdity of its near misses while also, laughably, giving them the sheen of plausibility.
In other areas to the film goes so far over the top as to launch itself from the planet like some kind of Baudrillard-inspired mockery of modern cinematic disbelief. The parodic casting of bombshell Rosario Dawson as an Air Force Investigator and hard-case Michael Chiklis as a pacifistic Secretary of Defence; the instant “witty” banter between the young leads thirty seconds after they meet and in the midst of fleeing several dozen police agencies; the grandly incomprehensible plot which shoehorns in Islamic terrorism in the most bizarre manner possible; yet all these pale in comparison with the race-against-time finale, which (seriously) involves preventing a ten year old playing a musical instrument. Thankfully, lead Shia LaBeouf has the right look of stern panic for this kind of business (the same cannot be said of the oddly drifting Michelle Monaghan), and the script is smart enough to keep him in the dark and obeying perverse orders for much more of the running time than one would expect.
It’s certainly not for everyone, and I find it hard to conceive of a situation when I would excitedly sit down to watch it again, but the very disposability and inconsequence of Eagle Eye may be part of the point, and perhaps supremely ridiculous fictions such as these will serve as a kind of tonic and re-adjust the focus of solid Hollywood fare away from exhausted trope of dangling, landing, lithe American bodies and back towards something with an investment in character and an awareness of the unpleasantness of injury, rather than the glamour of its narrow escape. Then again, perhaps not.
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